During the past couple of years, colleges have undertaken a variety of initiatives to promote sustainability on their campuses. Selling local produce and other foods in campus cafes, providing free CFLs, and the option to purchase green energy to power dormitory rooms are just a few examples of the ways in which colleges have sought to be greener. However perhaps the fast growing trend on college campuses is the banishment of the humble food tray, or trayless dining. Now, instead of providing trays for students to load with plates, glasses, and silverware, many cafeterias have done away with the large plastic slabs. Trayless dining discourages food waste, conserves water, and decreases energy use while saving colleges money.
Some campuses have already found that trayless dining cuts food waste up to 50%. The… [view entry]
In a recent Washington Post article, the climate change debate was brought to a new level: what about meat? Politicians and environmental activists alike argue over cap-and-trade, mitigation, adaptation, and hybrid cars, but what about the energy used and green house gases (GHG) emitted from intensive livestock practices (factory farms) across the nation, and around the world? The Post article cited a 2006 United Nations report stating 18 percent of global GHG emissions comes from livestock. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of acres of land stripped and cleared for cattle-grazing in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and the American West, to name just two major regions. The Amazon rainforest in particular acts as a major carbon sink on our planet, storing large volumes of CO2 from the atmosphere. Diminishing this capacity increases the precariousness of… [view entry]
From Canada comes the rather amazing story of Cansolair, a company that reuses soda cans to make solar panels. Once installed, this soda/solar unit can provide up to 30% of the heating for your house. All this in the cloudy, foggy Labrador region. All without adding another CO2 particle to the environment. Maybe Coke knew it was onto something when they introduced this new flavor last year.
Check out this video to see how it’s done.
Don’t have the cash for a new hybrid? Did you know that you can reduce your carbon footprint by the same amount as driving a hybrid by simply eating less meat? Well, now you do.
In 1971 Frances Moore Lappé wrote the vegetarian best-seller Diet for a Small Planet which hi-lighted the agricultural inefficiency of meat eating. (On average, it takes eight pounds of vegetable protein to generate a pound of animal protein.) As global warming has become a hot issue, that agricultural inefficiency is being measured with a new yardstick— the carbon footprint of meat.
As the food writer Marc Bittman writes in the New York Times article Re-thinking the Meat Guzzler.
To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of
… [view entry]
